Cady Goldfield wrote:
There are Japanese systems that "make people pop up off the floor and fly several feet backward" too. It's just not mainstream -- you don't see dojo on every block with that curriculum because the arts tend to be old bujutsu.
It is quite likely that these methods were obtained by Japanese people from Chinese sources a long time ago. It's too sophisticated to just pop up spontaneously, and the Chinese have a long history of such things. The Japanese practitioners since have adapted the methods to suit their particular environments, but the fundamentals don't change.
Wait a minute. Some of you guys need to get out and get a better feel for mainstream Chinese martial arts, not "the major CMA's that I've seen on the telly, etc.". Taiji is popular in the West and it's a moneymaker, so you see more of it *in the West* that you will see in China. "Popping people into the air" is something that catches a lot of westerners attentions, but it's not that big of a deal and it certainly wouldn't be my choice of things that are "common in Chinese martial arts", as much of them as I see. I.e., these types of remarks are simply ill-informed.